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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

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This is egregiously false. The author wrote a lengthy rebuttal of neoreaction[0]. The only sense in which he is sympathetic to Yarvin is that he reads his essays and argues against the ideas in them, as opposed to quoting the two worst sentences and calling him racist.

0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...

I'd said only that he expressed sympathy for neoreactionaries, and the above Twitter thread proves my point.

You probably shouldn't have said that. The case for his support for HBD-flavored racial supremacy is somewhat strong, and the case for his support for a new monarchy is not.

The case is not "strong" at all. He doesn't even state he supports HBD, only that he thinks some claims made by its proponents are likely enough to be correct or at least hard to prove not-correct. It's a rather uninteresting observation (everyone knows about some of these issues, they just disagree about the HBDers' causal analysis!) that only gets the attention it does because of how understandably contentious HBD is as a whole. The author does realize this of course, that's why he asks that the exchange not be publicized.

The email is right there for all of us to read.

Just because the primary source is both readily available but presented as images on Twitter (apologies for the hosting domain, skip down to "Scott Siskind Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12 PM"), the text:

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-kni...

Also includes his links.

The case for his support for HBD-flavored racial supremacy is somewhat strong

I don't think this is accurate at all. The case for his belief in HBD differences is strong. But I don't think you'll find evidence of him translating that to supremacy or any kind of racial ranking, especially across all dimensions. In fact, I think you'll find that he disavows any such conclusions.

He links approvingly to articles that appear to do exactly that, all the while saying that his public statements don't match his private feelings. Respectfully, I believe my own lying eyes.

> ... all the while saying that his public statements don't match his private feelings

Except that's not what he's doing, at all. There's no evidence that his links are intended to show approval either. A straightforward reading of what we've got is that he's probably been asked to discuss HBD in the previous (unseen by us) exchange and that's what he's doing, citing sources of HBDers' views.

That beggars belief. Not only does he cite them approvingly, but he takes the time to distinguish between which ones he finds particularly well-founded, and uses them as the summation for his first and primary argument, followed by "NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence".

Again: the mail is right there for everybody to read.

We don't need to guess what the author's thinking. we know what his first and primary argument is since he tells us directly: he thinks HBD is worth discussing because a few of its claims are either likely to be true or hard to prove as not-true. (And his cautious framing of even this limited issue is revealing enough. One idea he's very clearly not entertaining, not even in private is "HBDers are 100% right about everything!") I'm not sure what's your evidence for rephrasing "well-founded" as an expression of approval, given this previous context. The easiest way by far of reading that exchange is that the author is simply pointing to sources, not approving of them.

It's true, he doesn't think HBD-ers are 100% right about everything: Alexander is careful to point out that's he's not as sure about HBD's predictions vis a vis the four Albion's Seed English migrations to the US, in contrast to his other links, or the "absolute nuggets of gold" that include the HBD information he gleaned from neoreactionaries.

How much attention do you want to keep drawing to this email? I'm happy to keep talking about it, but then, you know what I believe about Alexander at this point, so you can see why.

This is where you might be missing some important context about Alexander's views. Namely, he's the guy who literally wrote a point-by-point refutation of neoreaction. And he clearly says in his email messages that he cares about debunking really bad neoreactionary ideas such as the ludicrous notion that we should all be collectively asking for a new king, like the frogs in Aesop's tale.

So why not just credit the simplest explanation, that he's disappointed at not being able to do the same with a non-trivial portion of HBD claims? Do we really need to believe that this guy is secretly a huge racist who believes in fixed hierarchies of moral worth among races, when literally everything he writes publicly takes the very opposite as its starting point?

Look, I know I sound glib here, and I'm trying not to be, I promise I am, but the funniest part about this is:

(1) I agree, Alexander isn't a supporter of neoreaction-ism, and

(2) One of the few valuable bits of information he claims to have gleaned from them is NRx-flavored HBD!

You get how that's essentially saying "well, I definitely don't think we should create a global monarchy, but those people do seem to have a point about the suitability of Africans for chattel slavery", right? That's what NRx-flavored HBD is. (I mean: it's really what all HBD is, but the NRx people are explicit about it.)

But don't just take my word for it. One of the two "more" well-supported links he cites is to Steve Sailer's blog!

I am not here to call you a racial supremacist for enjoying Alexander's writing, for whatever that's worth to you. I like a lot of Christopher Hitchens writing. That doesn't make me, personally, an alcoholic.

(I edited this a bunch, but tried not to change the meaning of anything I wrote previously. Sorry if that was annoying.)

Does it not concern you at all that you have, like, zero ability to assess the merit of HBD claims, and therefore are in no position to reason so glibly and confidently about Alexander's motives? If arguments for population differences are compelling, then all this schlock about suitability to chattel slavery and what have you becomes irrelevant. You imply that Alexander believes the former due to preferring the latter, but that's only a plausible accusation if the former is assumed a priori to be ridiculous.

(It isn't; on the contrary, there is no plausible scientific hypothesis that can attribute population differences solely to environmental causes. The entire blank slate case relies on sneering of the sort you do here).

I find it strange when competent people get so fixated on flaunting their ignorance.

I'm sorry again, but I just have trouble equating Scott's supposed agreement (by way of NRx) as to the nowadays-quite-fashionable claim that "American capitalism is uniquely founded on the oppression of enslaved Africans" with moral support for any claim of racial supremacy. A claim that slavery "worked" really well is tantamount to a claim that powerful, enduring systems of social organization could be built on the oppression of slavery as a foundation, and vice versa. These statements only differ by way of their connotation as to whether they assume slavery to be morally acceptable.

Nothing I am saying has anything at all to do with the 1619 Project (of which I am not especially a fan). When NRx people talk about chattel slavery, they're really talking about chattel slavery. Like, Calvin Candie style. And again: this is the part of NRx thought that Alexander found compelling. It's right there in the email! Which is about scientific racism, and Alexander's secret support for it ("NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS"). He called it "pure gold", like Kenny Bania on Seinfeld.

> When NRx people talk about chattel slavery, they're really talking about chattel slavery. Like, Calvin Candie style.

I suspect you're quite right as to where most real-world HBD-pushers are coming from. If this is your reason for your remark ITT that "HBD is generally problematic, and does tend to demand a response", I of course agree with that. I'll even sympathize with the intuition that engaging at all with such notions is by all indications a bad idea.

But when the guy who chooses to wrestle with some of these ideas is someone who has previously taken the time to logically and comprehensively debunk absolute monarchy, of all things, I think there just might be some room for extending the benefit of doubt.

We don't disagree about Alexander's support for NRx and never did. Follow this thread towards its root and you'll see me complaining that the person who brought this email up tried to claim Alexander as an NRx-supporter. That's a stupid hill to die on; Alexander is notorious for writing a ponderous rebuttal to NRx, and, more importantly, there's a much more attractive, easily climbed, and trivially defended hill right next door, as the email demonstrates.

I don't know if we agree or disagree about Alexander and racial supremacism. I think the email lays Alexander remarkably bare on that front, to a degree you don't often see even from people who publicly affiliate with white supremacy. It's a hell of a thing.

Finally: you're right: I'm not much interested in Alexander as a subject. I certainly wouldn't have brought his racial supremacist email into a random Alexander blog post! I think the comment that did was justifiably flagged. But once that happened, and HBD-curious comments started coming out of the woodwork... well, there's value in being clear about what was actually said, and in not pretending like it's defensible.

"Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it." - Moses Maimonides

As someone with zero context on any of this, what is this?

HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.

Between populations there are bound to be differences, but there are a bunch of issues with trying to map that basic fact on to racial IQ rankings:

1) Race isn’t a well-defined variable. It’s socially-constructed. Example: Italian-Americans have not always been considered white. And many people are mixed race.

2) Intelligence isn’t a great metric either. I’m not even convinced it’s a single number. There are people who are great at maintaining dozens of relationships, and can remember things about each person. There are people who are killer at problem solving. And there are people who have uncanny kinesthetic coordination. Which one is more fundamental to human cognitive tasks?

3) Distributions. What do we care about within a population? Is it the mean? That tells us nothing about how skewed the population is. Is it the median? There are problems with that as well. The population could have a bimodal or multimodal distribution. Then what?

4) Confounding variables. You know what’s a lot easier to measure than IQ? Money. Unfortunately a person’s quality of education is highly correlated to the wealth of their parents. And so is stress, which knocks down IQ as well. And there are a ton of other confounding variables too that I don’t know about because I’m not a social scientist. If you do a straight-up tally of IQ you’re not necessarily even measuring anything cognitive at all.

There have been a few adoption based studies that work to correct for confounders. Nothing conclusive obviously, but it's not like no one has thought of that stuff.

In the framework of materialism the above is a trivial conclusion: mind is a function of neurons that are a function of DNA.

That would be true if HBD people came to random, or even just varied, conclusions about gene/intelligence determinism, but of course, they come to a consistent and specific conclusion about it: a hierarchy of race-determined intelligence that goes Asians, Europeans, Everything Else, and then people of African ancestry.

Are you saying that the simple fact that many people have come to the same conclusion disconfirms that conclusion?

No, it doesn't, but it doesn't follow straightforwardly from the rationale the previous commenter gave, and that's telling. It's not complicated; it's a pretty simple motte-and-bailey.

Notice how neither you nor my previous interlocutor skipped a beat about the racial hierarchy I laid out, despite that not being in either of the previous two definitions of HBD on this thread. That's because the bailey is so well-understood it usually doesn't even need to be said.

The reason akomtu and I adressed the "mott" is that it was the claim ascribed to HBD:

> HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.

and the "bailey" can be split into two parts: one follows from the mott, that races could be ranking according to intelligence. There's obviously no MaB fallacy here. The second part is the specific racial ranking you provided. But no one had mentioned that until you got here, so it's clear that there's no intentional MaB fallacy going on.

No one was trying to affirm any specific ranking of races by intelligence. That's a closely related, but very different kind of question (a very empirical type question).

I don't think this is worth debating. I stand by what I said about this thread, but the question of what Scott Alexander meant is not in doubt; it's clarified in the email.

It seems to me that you just have a more specific issue with HBD than jasonhansel has.

jasonhansel takes issue with the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence

You take issue with another, related, one of HBD's ideas: a specific ranking of races by intelligence that it advances.

I was only supposing that the first claim seems likely to be true, so I'm not sure that there has been any substantive disagreement between us on those two matters.

This is a thread about an email chain from the author of this article, in which the context of "HBD" is made quite clear. There's no useful parsing to do here. If the term has other, more benign uses, I'm not aware of them, and am not super interested in discussing them; here, to be clear, we're most definitely talking about a malignant meaning.

I'm not suggesting that the term "HBD" has other more benign uses. I'm suggesting that it refers to a body of thought in which various claims are made, and that you are focused on one of those claims, whereas our ancestor comment was focused on another.

Race however is a social construct and that's where your tidy conclusion falls apart.

Race is a social construct in the context of American racial history and politics, where categories were invented long before the concept of genomic ancestry and "Hispanic" counts as a race. In the rest of the world and within the context of this discussion and other discussions of this sort "race" is a noisy proxy for continental-level ancestry, and it so happens that even American "races" correspond decently well to proportions of ancestry traceable to continental-level populations, with their distinct histories and adaptations. Separating unlabeled genomes into N clusters, we predictably arrive at close matches to traditional racial classifications.

The fact that some small (half a million, a few tens of thousands...) populations constitute distinct clusters that pop out at small Ns is a nice gotcha, but entirely beside the point – which is the a priori plausibility of noteworthy and systemic heritable differences between people of major races, irrespective of their belonging to any social constructs.

Race at a continental level is almost useless for biological purposes. Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. And those Kenayans have more in common genetically with an Irish person than they do with a Pygmy from their same continent.

If you want to look at very small populations then you can find useful biological similarities. And small populations are nothing like what anyone calls race.

Race is real. It's just socially constructed instead of being based in biology.

I agree that a more fine-grained classification is more useful. However, the fact that all the greatest long-distance endurance runners are of Kalenjin descent (Nilotic race) tells us next to nothing about any other trait. All the best sprinters are also Africans – but predominantly of Bantu ancestry, pretty diverse in this case. As are most NBA stars, and the great proportion of other athletes defined by a rather obvious subset of physical excellences linked to fast-twitch muscle fibers. At the same time, somehow no Bantu group excels in swimming. So using this method of yours, we derive that a great deal of a people belonging to a major race can have a similar ability profile in sports. Not too good for your argument.

If you have to refer to non-central examples, this only shows that your actual case is weak.

It's not that more fine-grained classification is useful, it's that race is not a useful biological classification. To build upon your own example, neither skin color nor running ability nor what continent you came from can be used to tell us about other traits.

But I'll let Princeton sociologist Dalton Conely explain to you what you're getting wrong about the science.

https://nautil.us/what-both-the-left-and-right-get-wrong-abo...

I would not call an obsolete social construct that only racists are still hanging on, "real" :

https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...

Ask the people who are oppressed by it if it's real.

Agreed that we should be dismantling it, but something has to be real to be dismantled right?

Agreed, we just seemed to be using two different meanings of "real".

The lines are a social construct, but there is a real physical spectrum underneath it.

It’s also a trivially false conclusion. No amount of great DNA can counteract lead poisoning.

The author of the linked article is a heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy, and therefore you should disregard anything he has to say on any topic whatsoever, no matter how well or poorly argued. After all, you don't want to associate with heretics, right?

While not endorsing the sentiment that we should disregard literally everything this author ever says, there are a variety of ways to be a "heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy", and "racial supremacist" is a particularly bad one. The objection isn't simply that the author doesn't believer workers should own the means of production.

I don't see Scott arguing for "racial supremacy" in any of the quoted emails though? He said he thinks genetic differences in intelligence are likely real, which is fundamentally different from "race x is superior to race y."

You didn't type the links he approvingly cited in by hand, and pull them up in archive.org, to see what they said, did you? That makes sense --- it's a pain --- but why would you hang your argument on the premise that nobody else took the time to do it? The links lay it pretty bare.

Somebody should take the time to further archive them, since this author keeps popping up, and, inconvenient though this truth is, it remains the apparent truth that he sent emails saying he believed this stuff.

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